If No Country for Old Men is a haunting tale of evil personified in a modern world where life is no longer valued, then Burn After Reading is an existentialist lark, lighter in style and shallower in substance, but still kin to its moral oblivion. A bantamweight follow- up to their Oscar-winning career-capper, Burn still boasts the Coens' gleeful disregard for happy endings and tidy resolutions -- which would be admirable if the climax didn't just feel like a quick trip to the garbage dump.

(Ed. Note: Spoilers on, BTW, if you plan on seeing the movie, which opens this weekend.)

The MacGuffin of the film is a CD-ROM of hardly classified information that a gym trainer (Brad Pitt) thinks is worth returning for a reward -- an idea that his colleague (Frances McDormand) thinks is great, as long as she can get a cut of the dough to pay for her array of hoped-for cosmetic surgeries. Turns out the information is just ammunition for an unhappy wife (Tilda Swinton) who wants a divorce from her ex-CIA husband (John Malkovich) and needs his financial profile to clean his clock discreetly. She'd rather cut him loose and marry her Federal Marshal lover (George Clooney), who's married himself and prefers to stay that way while continuing to nail chicks he meets online, including McDormand.

The film's trajectory is swift and brutal. Driven by ego, lust and vanity, people lie, cheat and steal; their lives unravel; and then everything gets destroyed. The pace is brisk, the characters are charmingly dislikeable, and the consequences are irreparable. In the Coens' world, redemption comes sparingly, if ever.

Is it funny? It's screwball nihilism. Imagine Jean-Paul Sartre working with the Marx Brothers: the fast-and-furious jokes lead to no exit at all. People are weak, and they deserve whatever calamities envelop them. There's no sense of innate goodness in the thick of chaos, like in Fargo; or the blithe zen that carries the Dude through turmoil in The Big Lebowski. Burn is just dramatic incineration, pure and simple.

That doesn't mean it isn't a good time, though -- but that's assuming you like talented actors mugging and hamming their way through scenes, and chewing up scenery like termites in rotting wood. There's more joy in watching McDormand's desperate eyes, Clooney's goofball smile and Pitt's frosted pompadour than there is in following the contortions of their characters' increasingly erratic fates. This is a movie of tangy moments and wink-wink asides, not any sort of fully-formed narrative.

Watching over them from afar is a CIA honcho (J.K. Simmons) who gets briefed on their shenanigans once the Russians start to get involved. There's nothing he can do except hope that the problem goes away, and his reaction to increasingly fatal consequences is mild irritation at best. A statement on imperial power and its sledgehammer approach to human life? Sure, why not. By the end, audiences will be as indifferent as the filmmakers.